Mobile Phones, Agricultural Prices, and the Intrahousehold Allocation of Technology

That’s the title of my most recent article, which was published by the Journal of Development Studies just before the holidays:

Using data from the Philippines, we study the impact of mobile phones on the prices agricultural producers receive for their cash crop. We first look at the impact on price of mobile phone ownership at the household level. Because this masks a considerable amount of heterogeneity, we then look at the impact on price of the intrahousehold allocation of mobile phones. We find that whether the household owns a mobile phone has no impact on price, but whether a farmer or spouse owns a mobile phone is associated with a 5- to 8-per cent increase in price.

For those of you without an institutional subscription, here is an ungated version of the paper.

If you are looking for longer discussions of the paper, I have blogged about it here and here.